Lavender Morning Read online

  Edi had a moment of feeling guilty. Perhaps the reason General Austin had sent Sergeant Clare with her was because the young man had been injured.

  “You were wounded?” she asked from behind her menu.

  “Yeah, by your damned general!” David muttered. “Think the potatoes are any good here?”

  Since the menu was mostly dishes made with potatoes, Edi didn’t bother answering him. She looked for the woman to take their orders but she was nowhere to be seen. “I think I’ll…” Edi broke off, not wanting to say that she was going to the restroom.

  “Go on, I’ll order for you,” he said in a way that was nearly a growl. “Unless you want something other than potatoes.”

  Edi had been around General Austin enough to know when a man was looking for a rousing good argument, and if Sergeant Clare didn’t stop speaking to her in that tone, she was going to give it to him. It was enough that she was in charge of seeing that they got to their destination and that the magazine was delivered; she didn’t need to put up with a surly man. From her observation, if Sergeant Clare wasn’t dangerously cocky, he was angry. When she got back to General Austin, she planned to tell him in detail what she thought of this man he’d sent with her.

  Edi got up from her chair, picked up her handbag, and started to reach for her satchel, but thought that carrying it to the restroom would draw too much attention to it. She didn’t think that Sergeant Clare had been told anything and she wanted it to stay that way.

  She took a while in the restroom. It was a home bathroom, with rose-printed curtains and pretty little soaps in a glass jar. This room, so very lovely, was why she got away from London and the soldiers and everything that reminded her of war as often as she could. She took her time washing her face, applying fresh lipstick, then taking her hair down, recombing it, and pulling it back again.

  When she got back to the table, the food was there, and it was delicious. There were huge, fluffy potatoes slathered in homemade butter, some beef that had been cooked for hours so it was tender, and some green beans that had probably been taken from the garden that morning.

  Neither she nor the sergeant spoke much, just a couple of comments on the rain, which seemed to be about to stop.

  After lunch, as Sergeant Clare limped back to the car and again held open the front passenger door for her, he said, “It would be nice if you sat in front so you could give me directions.” Again she ignored him as she opened the back door and got in. “One thing I can say about you is that you don’t give in easily, do you?” he said as he got into the car, again struggling with his left leg, which seemed to be stiff.

  “Would you please get back on the road? We need to make a turn in about three miles.”

  “Are you ready to tell me where we’re going and what we’re doing?”

  “General Austin wants me to offer my condolences to the widow of a friend of his.”

  “Yeah, I heard all that,” he said. Just then, the sky seemed to open up and the rain started coming down hard. David turned on the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work very well. The rain was so loud that he had to shout to be heard. “Do you know this road where we’re supposed to turn?”

  She started to say that she didn’t, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I have a map and it—”

  “So you know nothing,” he said loudly as he used his shirtsleeve to wipe the fog off the inside of the window. “Maybe we should pull over and wait this out. This car isn’t the best for these roads.”

  “No,” Edi said from the backseat. “We need to get to—” She almost said “Dr. Jellicoe’s” but caught herself. The car lurched as it hit a pothole, then slipped a few feet.

  “I really think we should pull over,” David said. “I can’t see where I’m going.”

  “Then we’ll walk if we have to,” Edi snapped. What was wrong with the man if he let a little rain bother him? She picked up her leather satchel off the seat and opened it to reassure herself about the magazine. If anything happened, she didn’t want it to get wet. Whatever was inside it had to be preserved at all costs.

  But when she opened the case, there was nothing in it but her notebook, two pencils, a pen, and the folded map. In disbelief, she pulled everything out onto her lap. There was no magazine. She put the contents back, then started searching the seat. Did the magazine fall out? She got down on her hands and knees and looked under the front seat, on the floor, in the rack in the back.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Sergeant Clare yelled over the sound of the rain.

  She leaned forward, her mouth close to his ear. “Where is the magazine?”

  “What magazine?”

  “The Time magazine!” she shouted at him. “Where is it?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he yelled back, his hand over his ear. “I don’t know what happened to your magazine. You took so long in the bathroom I got bored, so I started reading it. Maybe I left it on the chair, I don’t know. I’ll buy you a new one.”

  In all her life, Edi had never panicked, but now she did. “We have to go back!” she screamed. “Now! This minute. Turn this car around and go back. We have to get that magazine!”

  “Calm down—” David began, but then he saw her face and muttered an obscenity under his breath. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me it was important?”

  “It’s not your job to know anything!” she screamed at him. If he weren’t driving the car, she would have put her hands around his neck and squeezed. “I knew you were incompetent. I begged the general to give me someone else, but, no, he had to send me with you. So help me, when we get out of this—if we do—I’m going to recommend that you be court-martialed.”

  “You want to sit back and hold on?” David said in a voice that let her know he was as angry as she was. In the next minute he slammed the car around in a circle that sent them skidding on the muddy, slick road. The old car almost conked out, but it gave a couple of coughs, then kept moving. David gunned it and it slid from one side of the road to the next, but he kept it under control and finally straightened it out.

  In the back, Edi was slammed against one side of the car, then the other. She tried to grab on to the armrests, but when she’d get near one, the car would turn the other way and she’d miss it. Her head hit the door twice, and half the bobby pins in her hair came out then flew about the car, one of them just missing her eye.

  In a tidal wave of gravel, David stopped the car in front of the little cottage where they’d eaten lunch. “Wait here and I’ll—”

  “Go to hell!” she said as she got out of the car into the driving rain.

  There was a CLOSED sign on the window and the door was locked, but Edi started pounding and yelling over the rain. David started to say something to her, but then hobbled toward the back of the house to find another door. He was back minutes later.

  “Anything?” she shouted, the rain running down her face; her clothes were drenched, her hair straggling about her face.

  “Nothing. The place is locked up.”

  “There has to be something we can do,” Edi said. “Break the window.”

  “What?”

  “Break it down. Get inside. Look for the bloody magazine!”

  “If this is supposed to be a secret,” he shouted, “that will expose it.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” she yelled back.

  “Yeah, we could—”

  David didn’t say anything more because the front door opened, and Mrs. Pettigrew peeped out.

  “Come in,” she said. “You’re soaking.”

  Edi practically pushed David aside as she went into the restaurant. “Did you see a magazine?” she blurted out.

  “Oh, yes, the Time. We don’t see them much around here. It was nice to see about the Cavendishes and the—”

  “Where is it?” Edi asked, her question a demand.

  David stepped in front of her. “What she means is that she promised the magazine to her uncle and it was my fault it was left